The Greek citizens have rolled the dice and voted overwhelmingly to reject the “austerity” referendum. This was a way for voters to stick a finger in the eye of their creditors. The left around the world has responded to the vote with thunderous applause—and is selling the results as a vote for “the little guy.”

The Greeks believed that voting against the debt restructuring plan would give them more leverage with the banks, the IMF and the EU. But what happens now in Greece? The banks are shutting down this week. Withdrawals from bank accounts are being tightly restricted.

Greece is formally in default on its loans and in the weeks ahead as more IMF and EU loans come due, Greece is about to slide into fiscal oblivion. This is the natural and unavoidable consequence of socialism everywhere it has been tried.

From National Review Online, By Victor Davis Hanson, July 12, 2012 – We are witnessing a seismic shift in global affairs. The shake-up is a perfect storm of political, demographic, and technological change that will soon make the world as we have known it for the last 30 years almost unrecognizable.

Since the mid-1980s there have been a number of accepted global constants. The European Union was assumed to have evolved beyond the nation-state as it ended the cycle of militarism and renounced free-market capitalism. With its strong euro, soft power, and nonaligned foreign policy, the EU was praised as a utopian sort of foil to the overarmed U.S. with its ailing dollar.

Germany’s central bank has shot down EU proposals for a European banking union, warning categorically that eurozone liabilities cannot be shared without a fundamental shift towards fiscal and political union.

The Bundebank’s vice-president Sabine Lautenschlaeger hammered home the point in what is a clearly co-ordinated push to kill the plan. “The result would be a pooling of the governments’ liabilities through the back door,” she said. Photo: Alamy

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 9:20PM BST 12 Jun 2012 –

Andreas Dombret, a key board member of the Bundesbank, said the grand plan by Brussels is premature and unworkable as constructed.

“It has to follow a deeper fiscal union as it would imply significantly increased risk sharing amongst countries,” he told a Bank of America conference in London.

Let’s say this again, just in case a single sentient being on the planet has missed it: Germany cannot simply decide to bail Greece (or Spain, or Italy, etc) out of its debts. OK? However much Angela Merkel is nagged, berated, bullied and patronised by Barack Obama, David Cameron, or the BBC/Guardian axis that regard the preservation of the euro project as critical to their own interests, she cannot just revoke, in a unilateral act, the rules of German government or of the Bundesbank.

Germany’s ruling parties are to introduce a resolution in parliament blocking any further boost to the EU’s bail-out machinery, vastly complicating Greece’s rescue package and risking a major clash with the International Monetary Fund.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's office said an increase in the ESM was 'not necessary' since Italian and Spanish bond markets have already recovered Photo: AP

“European solidarity is not an end in itself and should not be a one-way street. Germany’s engagement has reached it limits,” said the text, drafted by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and Free Democrat (FDP) allies.

PM told to stand up to Nick Clegg and block eurozone members from using EU institutions to police their new fiscal compact

Prime minister, David Cameron, has delighted Conservative eurosceptics with his hard line on EU institutions.

From guardian.co.uk, by Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent, Monday 12 December 2011 15.44 EST – Eurosceptic ministers are to tell David Cameron to stand up to Nick Clegg and block the 17 members of the eurozone from using the institutions of the EU to police their new fiscal compact. Continue reading →